Re: Cotton wool for lens cleaning

Posted by mcammer on
URL: http://confocal-microscopy-list.275.s1.nabble.com/Cotton-wool-for-lens-cleaning-tp6175236p6180712.html

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I don't think there really is one general solvent.  When I began doing biological microscopy about 20 years ago the immersion oils all seemed to be made of the same stuff and easily cleaned with just about any organic solvent stronger than ethanol.  This is no longer the case.  For instance, the new Nikon oil for TIRF gets thick and is completely impervious to any of the aqueous cleaners.  It is resistant to what we practically considered to be the universal solvent of organics, acetone, and also to ethanol.  But dehydrated methanol works great.  On the other hand, the Zeiss oils, when fresh, clean up fine with their aqueous cleaning solutions and when old and dripped all over the turret and such, with acetone.  The old standby in the lab, Cargill Labs type DF, cleans up with any inorganic solvent.  Of course, in one lab the gospel was xylene because, well, we scientists tend to be superstitious or traditional.  As for ether, one benefit of using it, we were told years ago by someone at Zeiss, is that it evaporates so fast that it reduces the chances of dissolving the glue holding in the front glass of the objective.  Is this really a problem?  I've never had one of these front lenses come loose.  Now I tend to use 1:1 acetone/methanol and cotton swabs and/or lens tissue following in the footsteps of Spectraphysics service who uses this to clean their mirrors and gives us average power of a Watt with 100 fs pulses at 910-920 nm, so I follow by example.
-Michael Cammer

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